The role of traveler information

Transportation reliability is surprisingly difficult to characterize. To be considered reliable it’s therefore advisable to cover all bases: accessibility, predictability of the travel experience, timeliness and up-to-date traveler information.

As we illustrated in the last Review, there is no question about the importance and value of reliability to travelers - hence automobile users’ willingness to pay to use managed lanes that offer a guaranteed level of service. But what about transit users? 

A trip by public transit is more complex than an automobile trip in that it typically involves multiple steps – access and waiting at a stop or station, in-vehicle travel, transfers and egress – and the reliability of each step can affect the overall reliability of the trip. 

Research shows that experience of poor service reliability can decrease the chances of retaining a transit user in the longer term, so ensuring the ability of travelers to plan their trips with reasonable confidence that their expectations will be realized is key. Moreover, travelers may react differently to unreliability in the different steps. For example, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have found that travelers consider reliability of transfers (ability to make a scheduled connection, waiting less than 10 minutes for a connection) to be more important than reliability of access (ability to board a vehicle within 10 minutes of arriving at a stop). 

With increased appreciation of travelers’ perception of and response to reliability, transit system operators can take actions that are explicitly designed to improve it, focusing particularly on high impact system elements such as transfer points. It is of course impossible to eliminate completely  all sources of unreliability. This being the case, provision of accessible, accurate and actionable real-time data on transit service status is perhaps the most effective way for a transit agency to mitigate the impacts of unreliability on its users and to retain them as users in the long run. 

Sound Transit in the Central Puget Sound region is working to develop a new mobile web experience for its transit riders. The new smartphone and tablet responsive website will deliver trip planning, real-time transit departures, mapping, and schedule information to commuters in the region. Replacing an existing mobile website, this new application will be the result of over a year’s research by Sound Transit into how and when its riders use transit information systems, websites and apps. Steer Davies Gleave is working with local user experience, general transit feed specification (GTFS) data and design partners to deliver this exciting new project, expected to go live by Spring 2015.

Elsewhere, the Oklahoma Transportation and Parking Authority has used GTFS data to create web-based tools that enable a traveler to make informed, up-to-the minute choices about how they get from A to B (www.embarkok.com). 

SDG is a leader in the development of advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) and is currently working with several US transit agencies to help improve their offer.